Aegean and Anatolian Syllabaries

Miguel Carrasquer Vidal, November 2004

Introduction
In the second millennium BCE, literacy spread from Mesopotamia and Egypt to adjacent parts of the
Eastern Mediterranean area. There can be little doubt that the Semitic consonantal alphabet (abjad)
was directly inspired by Egyptian logoconsonantal writing. In the case of the essentially logosyllabic
Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform writing system, it is however not entirely clear whether the creation of
several logosyllabic and syllabic writing systems in the second millennium BCE was directly inspired
by the principles behind the cuneiform script, or only very loosely so.

Three such logosyllabic and syllabic writing traditions are known: the Byblos (“pseudo-hieroglyphic”)
script of Phoenicia, the Cretan-Mycenean-Cypriot scripts (Cretan hieroglyphic, Linear A, Linear B, the
Phaistos Disk script, Cypro-Minoan and the Cypriot syllabary), and the Anatolian hieroglyphs (a.k.a.
Hittite hieroglyphs or Luwian hieroglyphs). Of these, only Linear B, the Cypriot syllabary (both mainly
used to write Greek) and the Anatolian hieroglyphs (mainly used to write the Luwian language) have
been wholly or largely deciphered.

General characteristics of open syllabaries

The main point of agreement between the deciphered (logo)syllabic scripts enumerated above is that
they are basically open syllabaries, i.e. the syllabic signs are overwhelmingly of the type (C)V. We
may provisionally assume that the same goes for the as yet undeciphered syllabaries. This contrasts
on the one hand with Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform, whose syllabic signs are a mix of (C)VC and (C)V,
and, on the other, with Egyptian hieroglyphics and the Semitic abjad, which are (logo)consonantal
systems (i.e. the signs denote one or more consonants, but the quality and quantity of the vowels, or
lack thereof, are not expressed in the writing).

The genesis of the Sumero-Akkadian and Egyptian-Semitic writing systems is critically connected to
certain characteristics of the underlying languages (Sumerian and Egyptian, respectively). The
invention of the concept of writing itself (i.e. the use of pictures and symbols to denote language
sounds) can most naturally occur if the underlying language is predominantly monosyllabic (as is the
case in Sumerian): the resulting writing system will be logosyllabic, with syllabic signs for all the
possible word/syllable structures of the original language (V, CV, VC, CVC in the case of Sumerian).
The evolution of a logoconsonantal system like the Egyptian one, and the subsequent development
of a mono-consonantal script like the Semitic abjad, also depends crucially on certain phonotactic
and structural characteristics of the underlying languages, such as the lack of vowel-initial words, and
the alternation within a semantic group or a grammatical paradigm of forms with different vowels or
no vowel at all, but in a fixed consonantal framework, as can be found in Afro-Asiatic languages such
as Egyptian and Semitic.

Open syllabaries, however, based on the use of pictograms to acrophonically denote the initial vowel
or consonant+vowel of the object depicted, seem to represent a very intuitive and practical concept
generally, provided the concept of writing itself has already been discovered. The creation of such
writing systems does not appear to depend on specific characteristics of the underlying language, in
particular it does not depend on the language having exclusively open syllables. It may therefore
have been invented at several times and in several places independently, which may well be the case
for the three traditions (Byblos, Aegean and Anatolian) described above.
If an open syllabary is used for a language that does not exclusively have syllables of the type V or CV,
as is the case in Greek and Luwian, certain conventions need to be used in order to render those
speech patterns of the language which cannot be written straightforwardly, such as consonant
clusters and final consonants. Some of these conventions are quite universal: geminate consonants
are written as single consonants, and if another vowel follows after a consonant cluster, the
sequence is written using an “echo” of that following vowel (e.g. Linear B ku-ru-so for /khrusos/
“gold”). Final consonants can be written using an “empty” or “dead” vowel, the nature of which
depends on convention: Hieroglyphic Luwian uses Ca signs, e.g. wa-wa-sa = /wawas/ “cow”, while
the Cypriot syllabary uses Ce signs, e.g. a-to-ro-po-se = /anthr pos/ “man”). If the syllable-final
consonant is not a stop but a sonorant or fricative, it can be omitted altogether. In Linear B, this is
the norm for all syllables ending in -j, -n, -l, -r and -s (e.g. po-me = / n/ “shepherd”, a-to-ro-qo =
h w h
/ant r k os/ “man”, ka-ko /k alkos/, ko-wo /korwos/ “boy”, pe-ma /sperma/ “seed”). An exception
are diphthongs in -w which are written with the sign u (e.g. e-u-ke-to /eukhetoi/ “(s)he swears”),
and sometimes syllables ending in -m (e.g. a-mi-ni-so /amnisos/ “Amnisos”). In the Cypriot syllabary
and in Hieroglyphic Luwian, the practice of completely omitting the syllable-final consonant is only
applied to non-final syllables ending in -n (e.g. Cypr. a-to-ro-po-se /anth pos/ “man”, HLuw. DEUS-
TONITRUS-hu-za /tarxunts/ “(the god) Tarḫunt”), although in some Luwian inscriptions the practice is
extended to all final consonants.

We may assume that all symbols started out as pictograms / logograms. But in a predominantly
polysyllabic language, the signs could also be used to denote the first vowel or consonant+vowel of
the word (e.g. Luwian is logographically targasna “donkey” or syllabically ta). As the writing
systems developed, some symbols became specialized as logograms, others as syllabograms, and yet
others could be used in both functions. The purely syllabic signs naturally had a tendency to become
less pictorial and more “linear” or “cursive” over time, both because of the loss of association with
the object originally depicted, and because of their heavy use as syllables. Another tendency was to
reduce the number of symbols that could be used to write a single syllable, ultimately to one: the
Hieroglyphic Luwian syllabograms cannot be put into a neat syllabic grid like the Linear B
syllabograms can be (although in Linear B there are still a handful of alternative signs for certain
syllables), and the Cypriot syllabary follows the principle of “one syllable, one sign” almost
exclusively. Another common characteristic of the ancient Aegean and Anatolian open syllabaries is
the tendency for the logographic element of the scripts to become less prominent over time. This is
most readily seen in the history of the Anatolian hieroglyphs, where the oldest inscriptions often use
only a logogram, or a logogram with a phonetic complement used to specify the case or verbal form.
Later, the normal spelling adds more syllables of the root, or becomes completely syllabic, e.g.:

BOS /wawas/ “cow”

BOS-sa

BOS-wa-sa

wa-wa-sa

It is difficult to say how large the logographic component was in Cretan hieroglyphic (the probable
ancestor of Linear A and B, and Cypro-Minoan), but it is likely that many of the signs had an
exclusively or partially logographic value. Linear A and B, on the other hand, only use logograms in
conjunction with numerals, to denote what is being counted. For instance (tablet PY Eb297):
wa-na-ka-te-ro te-me-no
wanakteron temenos
“The estate of the king”

to-so-jo pe-ma WHEAT 30

tossojo sperma PUROS 30
“so much seed: 30 units of wheat”

ra-wa-ke-si-jo te-me-no WHEAT 10

gesion temenos PUROS 10
“The estate of the lawagetas: 10 units of wheat”

A millennium later, the Cypriot syllabary uses no logograms at all.

Linear B
The Linear B script was used on Crete and the Greek mainland (Mycenae, Pylos, etc.) for the purpose
of keeping palace records from ca. 1550 to 1200 BCE. Most of the surviving texts were inscribed on
clay tablets which got accidentally burnt. The first tablets were found in 1900 by Arthur Evans at the
site of the Minoan palace of Knossos, on Crete. Not many of them, however, were published right
away, and it wasn’t until the discovery by Carl Blegen in 1939 of a large number of Linear B tablets at
the site of Pylos, on the Greek mainland, and after their subsequent publication by Emmett L.
Bennett in 1951, that a decipherment of the script became possible.

Decipherment
In order to decipher an unknown script in an unknown language, when no bilinguals are available, it
is necessary to have a sufficient amount of accurately described data, so that statistical analyses can
be performed and patterns can be discovered. Some of the ground-breaking work in the case of
Linear B had already been done by Alice E. Kober, in the years between 1943 and 1950. She had
discovered that Linear B used two different forms for the totalling formula, one for women and
feminine animals, another for men and male animals. She also discovered the so-called “Kober
triplets”: words that occurred in one short form, as well as in two derived forms, with the final
syllabogram of the basic form replaced systematically by a couple of others, forming several
patterns:

A - - -
B - - -
C - - -
D - - -
E - - -

The system of numerals, measures and weights was elucidated by E.L. Bennett in 1950. The
complete decipherment was achieved by the architect Michael Ventris in 1952.

In reaching his solution, Ventris had combined several statistical and combinatorial clues. For
instance, in an open syllabary, the signs for pure vowels will occur mainly at the beginning of a word
(fortunately, the Linear B scribes were careful to mark word division consistently). At the end of the
word, some suffixes (consonant-initial ones) will be found as syllabic signs which may or may not be
found appended to the basic stem (a very common one in Linear B was - , which we now know to
be –kwe “and”). Other suffixes will manifest themselves as variations of the final syllabogram(s), as
for instance in the case of Kober’s triplets, and such variant syllabograms can thus be interpreted as
representing the same consonant, followed by different vowels. Other clues can be found in spelling
errors and spelling variants, indicating that the signs in question share a common consonant or a
common vowel. Putting all these clues together, Ventris started to elaborate a “grid”, listing all the
probable vowel and consonant combinations in tabular form. By February 1952, Ventris’ grid (see
Table 1) was already largely correct. All that was required now was to guess at the appropriate
sound values (a couple of them, such as C12 = /l/ ~ /r/, C8 = /n/, C3 = /p/, C7 = /s/ and C5/6 = /t/ ~
/d/ readily suggested themselves by comparison with the Cypriot shapes), and see if the resulting
readings made sense in any known language. Ventris himself had always believed (with Evans) that
the underlying language could not possibly be Greek, and would prove to be a pre-Greek Aegean
language, perhaps distantly related to Etruscan. However, in May/June 1952, Ventris started to
investigate some of the words forming part of Kober’s “triplets”. By guessing that the words of this
category that occurred both at Pylos and Knossos must be the names of corporations, and those that
occurred at Knossos alone or at Pylos alone would be place names, he succeeded in isolating the
Cretan place names ko-no-so (Knossos), and the nearby harbor town of a-mi-ni-so (Amnisos), the
latter with Kober variants a-mi-ni-si-jo / a-mi-ni-si-ja. Ventris noted that these corresponded exactly
with the Greek adjectival forms masc. amnisios, fem. , provided the spelling rules for final -s
differed from those of Cypriot. This was further confirmed by the genitives: masc. -jo-jo, as
expected, but fem. -ja, identical to the nominative, for what would have been the Greek fem.
genitive - s. A similar “abbreviation in the spelling” was also found by Ventris in the words for “boy”
and “girl”, which were expected to have been *korwos and in archaic Greek. Having
identified the sign ko in ko-no-so, the words for “boy” and “girl” (already identified thanks to the
logograms accompanying them) now read ko-?o and ko-?a. Filling in the syllables wo and wa, that
yielded ko-wo = ko(r)wo(s) “boy” and ko-wa = “girl”. Now if C2 in Ventris’ grid was /w/, that
immediately suggested a solution for the group of words that declined as -Ce- , -Ce- , -Ce- , and
which Ventris had already looked into before. They must be the well-known category of Greek words
in -eus (e.g. Grk. basileus, gen. [w]os, “king”, etc.), and the Linear B paradigm could be read
as -eu, -ewo(s), -ewe. Similarly, the totalling formula could now be read as masc. to-so, fem. to-sa,
corresponding with Greek tossos, . The Greek solution was now inescapable. Ventris, in
collaboration with John Chadwick, published his results in the 1953 Journal of Hellenic Studies under
the title Evidence for Greek dialect in the Mycenaean Archives.

Before the debate on the correctness of Ventris’ solution had had the time to become a matter of
hot academic dispute, evidence was unearthed at Pylos by Blegen which convinced all but those few
who had made up their minds not to be convinced. Tablet PY Ta 641, found just after Ventris’
decipherment, reads as follows:

ti-ri-po-de ai-ke-u ke-re-si-jo we-ke TRIPOD 2

ti-ri-po e-me po-de o-wo-we TRIPOD 1
ti-ri-po ke-re-si-jo we-ke a-pu ke-ka-u-me-no ke-re-ha [
qe-to PITHOS 3 di-pa me-zo-e qe-to-ro-we DEPAS-4 1
di-pa-e me-zo-e ti-ri-o-we-e DEPAS-3 2
di-pa me-wi-jo qe-to-ro-we DEPAS-4 1
di-pa me-wi-jo ti-ri-jo-we DEPAS-3 1
di-pa me-wi-jo a-no-we DEPAS-0 1

This fully confirmed Ventris’ solution: we find the Greek words tripode (dual) and s (singular)
next to what are described ideographically as two and one tripod, and pictures of vessels with
respectively four, three and no ears are accompanied by the corresponding archaic Greek words
kw s, s and s (cf. Classical amph s “two-eared”).

The syllabary
The sound values and shapes of the Linear B syllabary are given in Table 2. Some of the common
ideograms can be found in Table 3.

There are five vowels, vowel length not being marked. The consonants show a number of
peculiarities. In the stops, p-, k- and q- can denote any labial, velar or labiovelar stop, voiced,
voiceless or aspirated. In other words, the sign pa can stand for /ba/, /pa/, /pha/ (and, because of
the spelling rules, also /bal/, /pal/, /phal/, /bar/, /par/, /phar/, /bam/, /pam/, /pham/, /ban/, /pan/,
/phan/, /bas/, /pas/, /phas/, /bai/, /pai/, /phai/, as well as / /, / /, /ph /, / l/, / l/, /ph l/, etc.).
The exception is the t-series, which can denote syllables beginning with /t/ or /th/, while syllables
beginning with /d/ have their own symbols. Why this is so is a mystery. We can attribute it to a
phonetic/phonotactic peculiarity of (one of) the pre-Greek language(s) of Crete. This inconsistency
has been corrected in the Cypriot syllabary, which does not distinguish a separate d-series anymore.
Also attributable to the non-Greek origin of the Linear B script is the fact that /l/ and /r/ are not
distinguished, another thing that was set right in Cypriot.

The optional syllabic signs include a number of signs denoting dental + /w/, as well as three variants
of the main syllabic signs, apparently without any difference in pronunciation: ro2, ta2, pa3. The
latter is not pa2, because of the historical circumstance that the sign qa was at first erroneously
identified by Ventris and Chadwick as pa2. The existence of such variant signs is a remnant of a
situation comparable to what we find in the Anatolian syllabary, where many syllables have two or
more alternative spellings. Besides signs denoting diphthongs (ai, au, rai, rja), it is surprising to find a
notation for ha and phu, with the aspiration marked explicitly, and for pte, the only CCV sign in the
syllabary where both consonants are stops, and where the cluster /pt/ is quite characteristic for the
Greek language.

A few signs function both as syllabograms and as ideograms:

ju FLOUR aleuron
mu OX gw us
ni FIG sukos
qi SHEEP owis
sa FLAX non, bussos
au PIG? s
rai SAFFRON krokos
? GOAT aix

As can be seen, the acrophonic principle fails for Greek, which again confirms that the syllabary was
designed for some pre-Greek language of Crete. However, the sound/meaning pairs above do not
immediately suggest any other candidate language. Neither do the phonetic clues provided by the
syllabic grid, although there one has to proceed with caution. To find the “Minoan language,” or one
of its close relatives, it does not follow that one should look for a language that does not distinguish
/l/ and /r/, nor /b/ and /p/, /g/ and /k/, but that does distinguish /d/ and /t/. In the first place, it is
only required by the acrophonic principle that those sounds not be distinguished in word-initial
position. Greek itself at some stage did not distinguish /l-/ from /r-/ (more accurately, it had
eliminated all cases of initial r-), although by Mycenean times, the initial sequence *sr- had become
rh-, which would presumably have been written r-, had separate signs for it been available. Voiced
and voiceless stops are not generally distinguished in the Indo-European Anatolian languges (which
only had voiceless stops initially), nor in ancient Iberian (which had only voiced stops initially). Both
language groups incidentally also lack initial r-. As to initial d-, things also need not be so simple: it is
possible that the “Minoan language” distinguished two kinds of initial dental stops (d- and t- in Linear
B), but also two kinds of initial velar stops (q- and k- in Linear B), and that the system was in fact not
*p-; *t-, *d-; *k- but conceivably something like: *p-; *t- * ’-; *k- * ’-.
The Cypriot syllabary
The Cypriot syllabary was used on the island of Cyprus until Hellenistic times, mainly to write the
local Greek dialect, although a few poorly understood inscriptions also exist in a non-Greek local
language called “Eteo-Cypriot”.

The roots of the Cypriot syllabary go back to the Bronze Age. At Enkomi, and elsewhere on Cyprus,
inscriptions have been found from the 15th-12th centuries BCE in a script (or scripts) known as
“Cypro-Minoan.” There is not enough material to allow a decipherment, but there can be little doubt
that the script is an offshoot of the Cretan linear scripts, in particular of Linear A. An inscription on a
bronze dagger from the 11th century can be read using the Cypriot syllabary sign values as o-pe-le-
ta-u (/oph o/ “of Opheltes”), but otherwise the earliest inscriptions in the Cypriot syllabary date
from the 8th century BCE, and they do not become abundant until the 6th century. The best-known
Cypriot inscription is a very well preserved 5th century bronze tablet from Idalion, containing a long
text in the ancient Cypriot dialect of Greek. There are also a number of Cypriot-Alphabetic Greek and
Cypriot-Phoenician bilinguals, which played an important role in the decipherment of the script.

Decipherment
The Cypriot syllabary was deciphered in 1872 by the Assyriologist George Smith, after the discovery
in 1869 of a Cypriot-Phoenician bilingual inscribed for King Milkiyaton of Idalion and Kition. The
passage:

[ ildaw itk klm ] ntiklm klmL

lmlk mlkytn [mlk kty wʔdly]

pa-si-le-wo-se mi-li-ki-ja-to-no-se ke-ti-o-ne ka-e-ta-li-o-ne

...basilewos milkijatonos ketion ka edalion...

allowed Smith to isolate the names of the king and of the two cities, while a (correct) guess that the
first word was the genitive of basileus “king” allowed him to identify the language as Greek. The
subsequent discovery of more material, including Greek-Greek bilinguals (with the Koine text in
alphabetic Greek, and the Cypriot dialect in syllabic script) served to further refine and complete the
decipherment.

The syllabary
The Cypriot syllabary is a purely syllabic script. There are no logograms. In contrast with the Cretan
linear scripts, it is written from right to left (perhaps under Semitic influence). The inventory of signs
can be found in Table 4. The Cretan roots of the syllabary are evident from a number of sound-shape
correspondences, as shown in Table 5.

Apart from the direction of writing, the Cypriot syllabary differs structurally from Linear B in the
following points:

 The d-series and t-series have been merged;

 The l/r-series of Linear B has been split into distinct l- and r-series;
 The labiovelars have been lost in Cypriot, as in all later Greek dialects, and the q-series is
therefore no longer required.
The first change makes sense considering that voiced, voiceless and aspirated consonants are
otherwise not distinguished in either Linear B or the Cypriot syllabary. In this context, the (localized)
existence of a special sign to denote /ga/ in Cypriot is unexpected.

An important difference is that the Cypriot spelling conventions require that all consonant clusters
(except internal syllables ending in a nasal) be written in full. Thus Linear B a-to-ro-qo,
pronounced /anth kwos/ (nominative) or /anth kwon/ (accusative) corresponds to Cypriot
o-a-to-ro-po-se /ho anth pos/ or to-na-to-po-ro-ne /ton anth pon/.
Anatolian (Luwian) hieroglyphs
Anatolian hieroglyphs were in use in most of Anatolia and parts of modern Syria during most of the
second millennium BCE and in the first millennium up to ca. 700 BCE. The early material from
Hattusas and other centers of the Hittite Empire (largely inscribed on seals) makes heavy use of
logograms, making it impossible to say in which language they were written: most of the
syllabograms are consistent with Luwian, but Hittite cannot be excluded, and sometimes the signs
are to be read using Hurrian sound values. The later texts (ca. 900-700), mainly inscriptions on rock
and stone, but also some letters and records on lead strips, are from the “Neo-Hittite” (Luwian)
principalities of South-Eastern Anatolia and Northern Syria, and are written in the Luwian language.
A number of pithoi found at Altıntepe use Anatolian hieroglyphs to write the Urartean langauge (a
language related to Hurrian, that was spoken around Lake Van in modern Armenia).

Decipherment
The first inscriptions were discovered in 1812 by J. L. Burckhardt in Syria. The connection with the
Hittites, whose importance as the third major power in the Ancient Near East could only have been
guessed at by the references to them in the Old Testament texts, but which had become clear after
the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics and Assyro-Babylonian cuneiform, was first established
at the end of the 19th century by William Wright and Archibald Sayce, who were the first to use the
term “Hittite hieroglyphs” for the script. Sayce (1880) was also the first to make some progress with
the decipherment, by studying the so-called Tarkondemos seal and other Hittite seals which
contained brief texts in both cuneiform and hieroglyphs. Thus he was able to identify the logograms
for “king” and “land”, and some syllabograms. Similar analyses by Campbell Thomson (1913), based
on identifying the names of kings, cities and gods, led to the establishment of some more logographic
and phonetic values.

With the discovery in 1906/1907 of the cuneiform archives of the Hittite Empire at Hattusas
(Boğazköy, since 1936 Boğazkale), and the discovery by Bedřich Hrozný (1915) that they were largely
written in an Indo-European language, Hittite (Nesian, Hitt. nesili), with other documents in the
related Luwian language (Hitt. luwili), the decipherment of the “Hittite hieroglyphs” entered its
second phase. The language of the hieroglyphic inscriptions could now be checked against the
documents in Hittite and Luwian, and in the 1930’s substantial progress was made by a group of
scholars, among them Piero Meriggi, Emil Forrer, I.J. Gelb, Helmuth Th. Bossert, Hans Gustav
Güterbock and Emmanuel Laroche. By the 1940’s, many of the more common syllabic and
logographic signs had been correctly identified, so that when the first substantial bilingual text (the
Karatepe inscriptions in Phoenician and Hieroglyphic Luwian) was discovered in 1946 by Bossert, its
impact was merely to confirm what had already been discovered the hard way. Laroche’s Les
hiéroglyphes hittites (1960) and Meriggi’s Hieroglyphisch-hethitisches Glossar (1962) culminate this
phase of the research. Since then, work on the reading and understanding of the Luwian
hieroglyphic texts and their grammar has continued, and in 1974, J. David Hawkins, Anna Morpurgo-
Davies and Günter Neumann, based in part on earlier research by Bossert, Hermann Mittelberger
and Mustafa Kalaç, re-evaluated the readings of a small, but important, number of signs (see below).
They also established the convention to transcribe the ideograms and determinatives using Latin
translations, and suggested to abandon Sayce’s old denomination “Hittite hieroglyphs” in favor of
the more accurate “Luwian hieroglyphs.”

The syllabary
For the syllabic signs, see Table 6. For some common logograms, see Table 7.

The inscriptions consist of horizontal rows, to be read in boustrophedon fashion, with the signs facing
towards the beginning of the line, as in ancient Egyptian writing. The rows themselves are divided
into “panels” in which two or more signs are arranged vertically from top to bottom, although strict
reading order is sometimes abandoned in favour of aesthetics, e.g. to ensure that all available space
is filled. There is a sign to mark a word-break ( ), but it is not frequently used. The script is a mix of
logograms, determinatives and syllabic signs. As some of the signs do double duty as logogram and
syllabogram, there is, as in Egyptian hieroglyphics, a special notation to mark logographic use of a
sign (it is put in between “quotes”, e.g. “foot”). The syllabic signs are mainly V or CV (open
syllabary), although there are perhaps two VC signs, and some others have a more complex CVC(V)
reading. Unlike what is the case in Linear B or Cypriot, there is a rather large number of homophonic
signs (transcribed in Sumerological/Assyriological fashion as e.g. ta, tá, tà, ta4, etc.). There is no
polyphony as there is in cuneiform, where a single sign can have multiple unrelated phonetic values,
but, especially in the early texts, some of the signs can have an indeterminate vocalic value. In
particular, the same sign can be used for Ca and Ci (more rarely also Cu). In the later texts, there is a
tendency to modify signs in order to mark the quality of the vowel explicitly (e.g. 2nd millennium: =
za/i, 1st millennium: = za, = zi). Apart from the double underscore, the “staff” sign LITUUS could
probably also be used to modify the reading of a syllabogram (e.g. = /i/, = /ja/). However, the
other uses of the LITUUS sign remain largely mysterious. Another way to modify the reading of
syllabograms was by using ligatures. For instance, the sign /u(wa)/ was modified into /mu(wa)/
by adding the four marks of the numeral mawa “four”.

There are no signs to mark the vowels /e/ and /o/, and they probably did not exist in the language.
Long vowels (/ /, / / and / /) probably did exist, but are left unmarked in the script (plene spellings
such as -tu-u occur, but they are merely an aesthetic device to avoid gaps in the inscription). The
script is also deficient in not marking the difference between voiced and voiceless stops, with the
exception of the signs ta4 and ta5 which always seem to stand for /da/. Crucially for a writing
system that evolved by acrosyllabic interpretation of pictograms, the Luwian language (and Anatolian
languages in general) did not distinguish voicing of stops in initial position. The lack of initial /r-/ in
Anatolian also explains why the r-series is so poorly represented in the script: there are a couple of
signs for /ru/, but for /ra/, /ri/, as well as /r/ at the end of a syllable, the “thorn” diacritic is used,
which is not properly a letter, but modifies the sign to which it is attached. In the most recent Luwian
inscriptions, the “thorn” takes the place of what was earlier written using signs of the t-series, but
this reflects a change in the language, namely the rhotacism of /d/ > /r/. As in the Aegean
syllabaries, /n/ at the end of a syllable is always left unmarked, e.g.:

DEUS-TONITRUS-hu-za /tarxunts/ “(the god) Tarḫunt”.

Consonant clusters and final consonants are written using “empty vowels”, and geminate consonants
(assuming they existed in Luwian) are written as if they were single consonants. For evidence of the
Luwian acrophonic origin of the script, see Table 8.

The most radical change in the interpretation of the signs came with the joint article by Hawkins,
Morpurgo-Davies and Neumann in 1974. Meriggi and Laroche, in their fundamental works of the
early 1960’s, had established the values of the vowel signs as follows: = /a/, = /i/, or = /u/.
Besides these, some other pure vowel signs were recognized (á = , à = , a4 = , , ì = ). The variants
with double underscore were tentatively thought to represent long vowels (ā = , ī = ā3 = ),
although other proposals had been made (e.g. Gelb had suggested nasalized vowels). But, as
Hawkins et al. showed, the true value of the sign was /i/, alternating with /ja/, the latter reading
being distinguished in the first millennium texts by writing it . This also implied that the signs and
were not /i/ and /ī/, but, as Bossert and Kalaç had already suggested, stood for /zi/ and /za/,
respectively. The net result of these and other re-evaluations of the readings was to bring the
language lexically and morphologically closer to Cuneiform Luwian, e.g. the demonstrative pronoun
could now be read as za-, the plural endings as -(n)zi and -(n)za (the only equation that had to be
given up was that of CLuw. a-a-ja- “to make” with HLuw. *a-i-a-, now to be read as i-zi-ja-, but this
was a minor price to pay).
Bibliography
Bennett, Emmett L. (1996). ‘Aegean Scripts’ In Daniels, P.T. & Bright, W. (eds.), 125-133.
Chadwick, John (1967). The decipherment of Linear B (2nd edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chadwick, John (1987). Linear B and Related Scripts (Reading the Past series). Berkeley / Los Angeles: University
of California Press.
Daniels, P.T. & Bright, W. (eds) (1996). The wo d’ g y . New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dunaevskaja, I.M. (1969). Jazyk xettskix ieroglifov. Moscow: Nauka.
Friedrich, Johannes (1966). Entzifferung verschollener Schriften und Sprachen (2nd edition). Berlin / Heidelberg
/ New York: Springer.
Gordon, Cyrus H. (1982). Forgotten Scripts (2nd edition). New York: Dorset Press.
Hawkins, J. David, Morpurgo Davies, Anna & Neumann, Günter (1974). ‘Hittite Hieroglyphs and Luwian: New
Evidence for the Connection’ In: Nachrichten der Akademie der Wissenschaften. Göttingen 1973/6.
Hawkins, J. David (2000). Corpus of Hieroglyphic Luwian Inscriptions, Vol. 1 (3 parts). Berlin / New York: De
Gruyter.
Laroche, Emmanuel (1960). Les hiéroglyphes hittites I. Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique.
Marazzi, Massimiliano (1990). Il geroglifico anatolico. Problemi di analisi e prospettive di ricerca. Rome:
Università «La Sapienza».
Melchert, H. Craig (1994). Anatolian Historical Phonology. Amsterdam / Atlanta: Rodopi.
Melchert, H. Craig (1996). ‘Anatolian Hieroglyphs’ In Daniels, P.T. & Bright, W. (eds.), 120-124.
Meriggi, Piero (1962). Hieroglyphen-hethitisches Glossar. Wiesbaden: Harassowitz.
Palmer, L.R. (1963). The Interpretation of Mycenaean Greek Texts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ventris, Michael & Chadwick, John (1973). Documents in Mycenaean Greek (2nd edition). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Werner, Rudolf & Lüscher, Barbara (1991). Kleine Einführung ins Hieroglyphen-Luwische. Freiburg / Göttingen:
Universitätsverlag Freiburg Schweiz / Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Zinko, Michaela (2003). Einführung in eine anatolische Sprache: Hieroglyphenluwisch. Graz.
Table 1: Ventris' grid (February 1952)
Vowels I (=i?) II (=o?) III (=e?) IV V (=a?) unknown

0 -- -- -- --
C1 -- -- -- --
C2 --
C3=p? -- ? --
C4 ? -- ? --
C5=t -- -- --
C6=t ? --
C7 -- --
C8=n -- --
C9 ? -- --
C10 -- -- ? ?
C11=r/l -- ? -- ?
C12=l --
C13 -- -- ? --
C14 -- -- -- -- --
C15 -- -- ?
C? ? ? -- ? ? -- -- --

partially correct

correct
Table 2: The Linear B Syllabary
-a -e -i -o -u
∅-

d-

j- --
k-

m-

n-

p-

q- --
r-

s-

t-

w- --
z- ?
Alternative syllabic signs:
a2 = ha a3 = aj aw

dwe dwo nwa

phu pte pa3?

ra2 = rja ra3 = raj ro2

swi? swa? zu?

ta2 twe? two

Syllabic signs of unknown value:

B18 B19 B22 B34/35 B47

B49 B63 B83/84 B86 B89

Table 3: Some Linear B Ideograms
MAN AND ANIMALS CHEESE Ligature of tu + ro2 = Grk.
WOMAN turos “cheese”
OIL
MAN
OLIVE
PIG
SAFFRON 1. Ideogram, syllabic value /rai/
SOW (probably non-Greek).
2. Ligature of ka + na + ko =
Grk. kos “yellowish”
BOAR
SPICE

BOVINE, OX
TREE

COW
WHEAT

BULL
WINE

SHEEP
OTHER

EWE
ARMOUR

RAM
ARROW

GOAT
BATHTUB

SHE-GOAT
BRONZE

HE-GOAT
CHARIOT

EQUID
WHEELED
CHARIOT
MARE
CHARIOT FRAME

STALLION
CLOTH

DEER
DART

PLANTS AND FOODS DIPTE

BARLEY FOOTSTOOL

CYPERUS GARMENT

FRUIT Ligature of ka + po = Grk. GOLD

karpos “fruit”
HONEY Ligature of me + ri = Grk. meli
“honey”
HELMET VESSEL 211 Ligature of vessel and syllable po

MONTH VESSEL 212

OINTMENT VESSEL 213

SPEAR VESSEL 214

SWORD VESSEL 215

SWORD2 VESSEL 216

THORN VESSEL 217

VESSEL 155 VESSEL 218

VESSEL 200 VESSEL 219

VESSEL 201 VESSEL 221

VESSEL 202 VESSEL 222

VESSEL 203 VESSEL 226

VESSEL 204 VESSEL 227

VESSEL 205 VESSEL 228

VESSEL 206 VESSEL 229

VESSEL 207 VESSEL 250

VESSEL 208 WHEEL

VESSEL 209 WOOL Ligature of ma + ru (non-Greek,

but cf. Grk. mallos “flock of wool”?)
VESSEL 210
Table 4: The Cypriot syllabary
-a -e -i -o -u

∅-    
j-     
k-     
l-     
m-     
n-     
p-     
r-     
s-     
t-     
w-     
x/z-     
(g)-     
Table 5: Cypriot-Cretan shape-sound correspondences
Cypriot Linear B

lo ro

na na

pa pa

po po

sa sa

se se

ta da

to to
Table 6: The Luwian syllabary (after Marazzi)
-a -i -u
ø- á à i/ja í u(wa)
-- --
j- ja já
--
wa/i wá/wí
w- wax

wax/tax?
p- pa pi pu

ta ti tu

tá tí tú
t- tà tù

ta4/tì tu4

ta5/ti4 ta6

ka ki ku
k-
kà ki?

za za/i > zi zu
z- zá zà,zì zí zi4 zu(wa)/zù

za4 zú(?)

sa sá si su

sà sí(?) sú
s-
sa4 sa5

sa6 sa7

ha hi hu
h-
há hux hux?

ma mi,má mí mu(wa)
m-
max(?) mì

na ni nu
n-
ná ní nú
 na5(?) nix

la li lu/lá/lí
l- lá/í, lu lì

lax li4? lix

+ra/i ru
r-
rú

(C)VC(V) signs:
ara/i

hal har

ka+r

kwi hwi

para/i

tal tár tana t(a)ra/i

ur(a/i) us(?)
Table 7: Some Luwian ideograms
1 DELERE (MINUS+DOMUS)
“to destroy”
3 DEUS “god”

4 DIES “day”

8 DOMINA “lady”

9 DOMINUS “lord”

ANIMAL
DOMUS “house”

ANNUS “year”
EDERE “to eat”

AQUA/FLUMEN “water/river”
EGO “I”

ASCIA “axe”
EQUUS “horse”

ASINUS “donkey”
EXERCITUS “army”

AUDIRE “to hear”

FEMINA “woman”

AVIS “bird”
FILIA “daughter”

AVUS “grandfather”
FONS “fountain”

BIBERE “to drink”

FORTIS “strong”

BONUS “good”
GAZELLA “gazelle”

BONUS2 “good”
HEROS “hero”

BOS “ox” INFANS/FILIUS/FRATER

“child/son/brother”
BRACCHIUM “arm”
INFANS+REX “child+king =

CAELUM “heaven, sky”

prince”
INFRA/SUB “under”
CANIS “dog”
IUDEX, IUSTITIA “judge, justice”
CAPERE “to take”
LECTUS “bed”
CAPUT “head”
LEO, BESTIA “lion, beast”
CASTRUM “fortress”
LEPUS “hare”
CENTUM “100”
LIBARE “to libate”
CERVUS “deer”
LINGERE “to lick”
CORNU “horn”
LINGUA “tongue”
CRUS “leg”
LITUUS “staff”
CULTER “knife”
LONGUS “long”
CURRUS “wagon”
LOQUI “to speak”
DARE “to give”
LUNA “moon” POST “after”

MAGNUS “great” PRAE “before”

MAGNUS.DOMINA PUGNUS “fist”

“great.lady (queen)”
MAGNUS.DOMUS REGIO “region”
“great.house (palace)” REL (relative pronoun)
MAGNUS.FILIA
“great.daughter(princess)”
REX “king”
MAGNUS.REX “great.king”
SACERDOS “priest”
MALUS “bad”
SCALPRUM “chisel”
MANUS “hand”
SCRIBA “scribe”
MINUS “less”
SCUTUM “shield”
MONS “mountain”
SIGILLUM “seal”
MURUS “wall”
SOL “sun”

SUPER “above”
NEG (negation)
TERRA/LOCUS “land/place”

NEPOS TONITRUS “thunder”

“nephew /grandson”
TURRIS “tower”
OCULUS “eye”
URBS “city”
OMNIS “all”
VAS “vase”
OVIS “sheep”
VIA “road”
PANIS “bread”
VINUM “wine”
PES, PES2 “foot”
VIR “man”
PINCERNA “cup-bearer”
VIS “force”
PITHOS “jar”
VITA “life”
POCULUM “drinking cup”
VITELLUS “calf”
PONERE “to set”

PORTA “door”
Table 8: Acrophony in Luwian (after Zinko)
Sign Syllabic value Luwian word Logographic value

pi piya- “to give” DARE

tà ta- “to take” CAPERE

ni niya- “to turn”

la lala/i- “tongue” LINGUA

t(a)ra/i t(a)ri- “three” 3

má mawa “four” 4

nu nuwa “nine” 9

ma4 massani- “god” DEUS

zí ziti- “man” VIR

ta targasna- “donkey” ASINUS

rú karuwar “antler” CERVUS2

sú surna- “horn” CORNU

wi wiyana/i- “wine” VINUM

lu lukk- “to shine”

pa pattar “basket”

tù tuppi- “tablet” SCRIBA

sa5 sasanza “seal” SIGILLUM

hú huppar “a vessel” VAS